And I’m still able to do that, just as I did beforehand. I think mostly what makes a good teacher is paying very close attention to the students, and crediting what they say. But my engagement with the students is similar, I think. I used to stand when I taught except when I was in a seminar. I can’t stand to use the blackboard, which I miss. My classes are smaller because I can’t handle a large class. But in the classroom, I would say there is very little difference. It’s harder handling books, harder handling papers, harder just getting around. I’m really not trying to say that’s it’s this way universally-it’s not.ĭo you feel your paralysis has impacted your teaching? I know that there are people who are in wheelchairs who feel differently from me, and that’s fine. I feel a real loss in not being able to project myself into the world as I wish to be seen.

They’re often in the way, it’s hard to get around them, they make progressing through the world slower, etcetera, etcetera. They’re big, they’re cumbersome, I’m not at the right level, etcetera, etcetera. I think that the thing that people recognize most immediately about me is that I’m in a wheelchair.

Because when you look at somebody you immediately recognize something. … Then I got hurt and what I say is that I no longer have a gender, I have a wheelchair. Indeed, I got misrecognized as a man before I was injured, but it didn’t bother me.

If you didn’t know that category, you’d think that I was a woman with short hair who walked like a man. When I hurt myself, I think that I was easily identifiable as a butch lesbian, if you knew that category. How did paralysis impact your view on gender identity and the views of other people around you? The book also addresses your experience with gender following the accident. Yeah! As in, don’t even give me a statistic. I couldn’t quite believe that we’d both come there. When I was lying there in the hospital it felt like going through some looking glass where suddenly I’m on the other side and I’m in the land of quadriplegia. I knew about his life and what was required for him to get through a day and go through the world. How did that color your experience of your paralysis and how did you connect the two in your mind? In the book, you make a connection between your paralysis and your brother’s paralysis from multiple sclerosis, which happened earlier in your life.

A Body, Undone by Christina Crosby